Merrick House Ex-Director Receives Ione Biggs Social Justice Award
by Joe Narkin

(Plain Press, August 2008) Gail Long, the retired, long term Executive Director of Merrick Social Settlement House, an agency serving Tremont, Clark-Metro, and Old Brooklyn, received the 2007 Ione Biggs Social Justice Award in honor of her four decades of work on behalf of the economically and socially disenfranchised families of Cleveland. Long was presented with the award at the “Partnering to End Homelessness” dinner of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH) on May 2 2008.

Long, a native of Hawaii, started her career as an outreach worker on the Near West Side of Cleveland upon completing her master’s degree in social work at Case Western Reserve University during the 1960’s. As an advocate of the Saul Alinsky school of community organizing, she quickly established herself as ready, willing, and capable of effectively tackling the toughest issues facing low income families on the West Side and throughout the City of Cleveland. Saul Alinsky was a guiding national influence in the development of effective community organizing techniques based upon his community organizing work with impoverished residents living near the stockyards of Chicago beginning in the 1930’s.

During her career, Long was instrumental in achieving a peaceful transition to court ordered busing on the west side, and in assuring that Metro Hospital remained an institution serving low income resident. According to Brian Davis, the Executive director of NEOCH, Long also helped the homeless, unemployed and working poor survive during a two decade long governmental campaign to systematically eliminate the economic safety net necessary to protect the poorest and most vulnerable families among us, Ione Biggs, who died at the age of 89 in 2005, was a lifetime Cleveland resident who achieved international renown when she helped successfully organized (as co-director with Cleveland resident Renate Jakupca) the United Nations 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. In appreciation for their persistence in organizing the conference and their long-term efforts to eliminate racism, poverty, and social injustice in Cleveland, Biggs and Jakupca received the Nelson Mandela International Gold Medal Leadership Award in Human Rights.

Long was the second recipient of the Ione Biggs Social Justice Award; Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson received the award in 2006.

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